


(if you are a savage, stand up)

by theworthofhollin



Category: Captain America (Movies), Norse Mythology, Norse Religion & Lore, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 09:00:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1220386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theworthofhollin/pseuds/theworthofhollin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year is 1943 and a man is spitting blood onto the floor.</p><p>She doesn’t mind the blood. These days, she doesn’t even notice it anymore. It’s as common a sight to her single functioning eye as the dirt below her feet. </p><p>Although to be fair-- as one of the oldest gods of Death-- she’s seen quite a bit of both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Symmetry

**Author's Note:**

> (May be continued throughout the film arcs, idk, feel free to comment with ideas)

The year is 1943 and a man is spitting blood onto the floor.

She doesn’t mind the blood. These days, she doesn’t even notice it anymore. It’s as common a sight to her single functioning eye as the dirt below her feet.

Although to be fair-- as one of the oldest gods of Death-- she’s seen quite a bit of both.

The man though, he’s interesting.

She was called here to fetch a dying soul, and yet, when she arrives he is still choking on words (name, rank, serial number-- she’d heard it all before in this childlike, many-faced war. Too many of her charges were left as dust and ashes while the rest were dying in dark basements). She couldn’t quite understand the man’s mantra, but she knew who he was either way.

She knew his name was James. She knew he was barely two and a half decades old. She knew he was born and raised in a place called Brooklyn, where she knew he had a younger sister. She knew his favorite color was blue.

She knew he had once been a bright spot of light in the charred battlefield, clean and graceful with soft, soft, edges, but as she stepped out of the shadows to better hear his slowly thumping heart, all she saw in him was mottled gray.

Still, quite a lovely gray.

O _h, how far from home you are,_ she whispered to herself as she wiped a ghostlike hand across his cheek. The cold was creeping into his bones, it wouldn’t be long. Even if he were aware, he could neither see nor hear her in the chilly, dank cell somewhere under the blackened bit of land they called Azzano. She floated closer. He was quite handsome. For a mortal.

Maybe she would wait for him to pass over. Yes, her cousins would man the battlegrounds in her stead. Nephthys and the greeks always hated when she overstepped her territory, and the Valkryie were always a bit snippy- but she couldn’t help her curiosity. Norse icons weren’t known for staying on the homefront (all that wild Viking blood just begging for more).

She could hear shouts echoing in the distance. A metal clang of a door slamming open followed by heavy footfalls. She ignored the sounds until something in the air shifted. A heartbeat thumped harder. A man’s breath exhaled softly in the cold.

Hel felt her grip slowly loosen from the bruised, graying soul tucked under the ribcage in front of her, and she stepped back in the darkness.

“ _Bucky_?”

A desperate plea broke the silence, and a man in uniform (what a plain, wretched uniform; she missed the days of men wrapped in scaled plates of shining metal) stepped through the door. Hel watched closely as a bloodied James Barnes slowly woke from his half sleep and opened his eyes. She tilted her head in intrigue, _this was new,_ she thought, and turned to take a look at the boy soldier scrambling towards her delightfully singed soul on the table.

Her old eyes had never seen such light in all her days.

She blinked to clear her vision, blinded by the hand of god that rested so obviously on the man before her. The two figures, one so recently on the brink of death, the other so recently reborn, gripped each other tightly as they limped out of the cold cell. She didn’t follow.

She could see the marks stained onto their souls. She would not be ferrying them for quite a while.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be curious. The dead half of her face stretched into a grin.

_How exciting._


	2. Companion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hel tends to wander.

The years of war tend to blend for her, and it feels like a blink of an eye before she sees either of her boys again (although in reality its been almost half a decade). Her hands are stained with soot and rust and she knows she will feel the cold, white ash in her form for the rest of her days. _The Lady Death has a bad habit of gathering scars,_ her silver-tongued father commented once, teasingly, in the aftermath of Pompeii.

That was the first time she realized how deeply ash could stain.

She ferries souls by the hundreds, hand picking those from the rubble of cities; beautiful boys riddled with bullets, choking on gas and smoke and dust. Her realm was unprepared for such a crowd, and thankfully her siblings have not been lax in their duties. Her southern cousin tends to join her sometimes, wandering the carnage on his sweet, pale horse. She has her blackened right hand gripping the horse’s mane to steady herself in the wreckage (somewhere in France, maybe?) when she hears the familiar cry again:

“ _Bucky_! Hey, come on, were moving out!”

The voice is deep and strong, commanding, and for a moment her dead heart flutters. _Ah, how sweet it is to see such innocence_ , she sighs to herself as she watches a much more imposing Steve Rogers call for his brother across the ruins. He is still so so bright she _aches_ to step closer.

Her shadowy cousin grunts at her, a question, while she stands frozen in the midst of their camp. They are both unseen by the bustling life around them, and he nudges her gently in confusion. She makes a gesture to wait. From under his hood, he nods. He prefers actions to words, for some reason. (She knows he will only speak once in his existence, and today is not that day.)

“Cool your jets, _Captain.”_ The dry tone comes from behind her and she turns to see James Barnes, in all his broken patchwork glory, sauntering towards her. Her hand reaches out involuntarily, as if to stoke his bruised cheek again, but he steps through her fingers and walks out on the other side of her intangible form. She tastes coppery metal in her mouth as he wisps through her, and she turns in time to watch him pause in his confident step.

He is staring at her, directly, and his gray-blue eyes are very wide.

She tucks her long black hair behind her ruined ear and stares back. He blinks several times, and then a soft shiver runs down his spine before he furrows his brow and turns away from her again, his stride much less relaxed.

Her cousin’s horse is nibbling at her sleeve but its rider stays comfortably silent, waiting.  She pulls away, following behind the darker of her two inclinations to where he joins the group of soldiers at a makeshift table. They stand around a map, red X’s scrawled across the landscape randomly, and she leans her ghostly form through a jovial, mustached man to take a closer look. He stuttered his speech and shivers, stepping away subconsciously to give her space. She utilizes it.

The markings seem to signify a pattern, but these mortal realm names don’t make much sense to her. Boundary lines are much more specific when it comes to the gods. But her eye is drawn to a mark near the mountains close to her homeland, and she glances across the crowded table to watch her two soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, laughing softly. Her claim on James Barnes is warming again, but slowly and quivering like a flame. She raises a brow. _So I will find you in the mountains, it seems,_ _but how long will you deem to stay?_

She’s seen unions like this before, and she watches closely as the bright white soul mingles with the dirty, bloodstained gray. _Such symmetry, such balance_ , she thinks as she touches the skin that covers only one half of her face, _for one knows that light cannot exist without the darkness_. If there is one thing Hel can fully appreciate, it’s symmetry. And yet, the brighter the sun, the darker the shadow, her mind whispers, (as it floods with memories of a grief-stricken warrior wailing **_PETROCLUS_** across the dry, desert sands; a bloody Wolf-Brother of Rome lying dead with his throat torn out inside his city walls; and even farther back, to a time before her world went cold and gray, when two lonely brothers wandered the empty earth and Cain stole his brother’s last breath with a sharp stone to the skull--)

She pulls herself from the sticky edges of the past and steps around the group of men, the mustached man instinctively stepping out of her way as she maneuvers towards her two boys. The white star on her Captain’s chest is clean and untarnished in the midst of their filthy surroundings and she places a gentle hand over his heart (just to feel that vast organ beat just once). He barely reacts, too distracted with his companion to notice the dull tingle spreading though his ribcage.

His soul is so clean Hel can barely breathe, not that she needs to. She still exhales shakily and turns a fond smile on his partner, sweet and grotesquely tender, one of the few she has given in these last centuries-- undoubtedly wasted on him, but she can’t help it. She stares at his uniform, stained and torn in places from close combat and harsh conditions, so foul compared to his counterpart (several specks of blood are still evident even to her eye) and she wonders if they can see how easily they play into their roles.

Its almost as if they were made to fit, she reflects, as she brushes her cold cold lips across her Sergeant’s scarred cheek. He flinches at her kiss, but otherwise doesn’t notice.

A loud whicker cuts through the camp, and Hel watches as the pale horse stomps impatiently in the middle of the road, her cousin gazing balefully at her from his hunched position. (Several of the soldiers in the nearby tents glance up in puzzlement, young eyes wide and searching; she knows she will see these men soon.)  She wanders back to his side and pointedly ignores the look tossed her way; she simply nods and grasps the stallion’s mane in her dead hand as they continue on their path through the wreckage.

The taste of blood and metal still lingers on her lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, feel free to comment with any ideas and/or criticisms, I'd love some feedback:)


End file.
